A lot of people in these so-called United States became politically active for the first time with the Occupy Movement. Vanessa Edwards Foster however, was not exactly a newbie. I remember hearing Foster say, when I first met her at Tranquillity Park, that the timing of Occupy Houston was fortuitous for her, since she was out of work at the time. She was much more of a regular at the encampment than I was.

Like several other Occupiers, Foster answered the call to Occupy the Ballot in 2012, running as a Green candidate for the US House in District TX-9. She received just under 1% in a four-way race without doing much visible campaigning.

It appears that the electoral bug has bitten Foster again: She is once again a candidate for the Congress, this time hoping to take Blake Farenthold's seat in TX-27. Or better yet, to throw out the seat he has occupied since 2011 and buy one he's never touched. Texas Leftist has her responses to the standard questionnaire.

Reviewing the WebsiteIMHO, vanessafoster4congress.com is mostly good, laying out some solidly progressive positions on the Positions page (give or take her position on the Second Amendment), but overall the site needs some work. The cover photo looks nice, with a smiling Foster in front of the Corpus Christi Skyline; the photo at the bottom of the homepage is...kinda disturbing, at least in my browser. There are also minor but irritating typos here and there.

More importantly, however, the site does not state explicitly whether Foster is running as a Democrat, independent, or under some other party's banner. (Correct answer: Democrat.)

This year, Foster is one of four Democrats in the primary battle. But nowhere on the site does it say something like "Vote for Vanessa Foster in the Democratic Primary on March 6." In this political environment in which primary turnouts are in the teens, when even educated voters get confused about which election is when, that's a major oversight.

The Post-Farenthold Future in Nueces CountyOn the Republican side, six candidates have joined the fray, vying for a seat that Ballotpedia calls Safe Republican, even in light of Farenthold's ignominious exit and the bad taste it left in the district. When Farenthold waited until after the filing deadline to withdraw from the race, there was some question as to whether any Republicans would be allowed to file to run. In the 2010 election, (Farenthold himself benefited from the Texas Lege's legally dubious redrawing of the district following the census and the Tea Party Insurgency.)

While it is a bit disappointing to see Foster filing to run as a Democrat, it is also completely understandable given the Green Party's current condition in Texas. It is equally understandable that several active Greens in this state have filed to run independently. Although the Green Party of Texas had its state convention in Corpus Christi last year, it has no firm presence in Nueces County as of now, but that's in the process of changing as of this writing. If she doesn't succeed in this primary, I hope that Foster will help Greens in Greater Corpus get organized.

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DBC Sez...

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